“Wait,” I hear you wondering, “why doesn’t this progress log have an [END] to indicate that you’ve finished it since you were so close in the last one?” Oh, we’ll get into that. Believe me. For now, though, the same warning applies here as in the last progress log: there will be necessary spoilers ahead, so stop reading if you hate fun and want to step on all of Lost Sphear’s irritating landmines for yourself.

Biblical tedium

The party made it into what looked to be the final dungeon, but the final boss beat them up and stole their lunch money in a cutscene, so they had to flee and regroup. Worse, evil scientist boss guy had a force field that could only be damaged by a super-secret weapon that the story conveniently pulled out of its nether regions, but it was so powerful that half of it was hidden away in Secret Prince’s lost country that the main character is too weak to bring back. Somehow it’s deduced that the reason he can’t bring it back is that one of those magical columns (like the one that brought back the phenomenon of nighttime) is lost, so everyone has to restore that first, but doing so requires flying all over the world looking for the three spots where you can see the moon so that everyone can put their deus ex machina hats on and channel their feelings into something the main character can use. The column is finally restored, the kingdom is brought back, and a mini-dungeon and boss fight later, we have the weapon plans. After that, there’s some running around and a dumb minigame to deal with, but it looks to be a straight shot to the credits. All that’s left is to fly to the final dungeon and whack the final boss with our pointy implements.

He’s not a pushover, though

The video above is the same as many of the longer videos I’ve posted thus far, which is to say that it consists of me running around and bulldozing normal enemies with ease, only to come to the boss and get reduced to a fine paste smeared across the pavement within moments. Never change, Lost Sphear. Or better yet, do.

My patience for this crap ended at the frog boss, so I decided to spend all of my money on weapon and armor upgrades. These have the same problem as the upgrades in I Am Setsuna, as you’re gaining new weapons and armor frequently enough that upgrading anything that isn’t end-game quality is far too costly to justify. But hey, final boss, right? I upgraded a couple characters, went back, and finally beat down scientist dude. Boom, an unsatisfying cutscene and credits. Finally.

And that was Lost Sp… WAIT, WHAT?

There’s a final save, which I figured tied into some kind of New Game + mode (that’s usually the case). Since that’s relevant review information, I decided to load up the save and see what the deal is, only for the game to keep going. And going. And going. You’re a filthy whore liar, Lost Sphear. I thought that waking up somewhere new was a post-credits reward like the developer room in Chrono Trigger. Nope; the story just isn’t done yet. Then I figured it’d be a quick wrap-up. An hour or two later, it dawned on me that I had no idea how far I was in this game anymore. Worse, I had eaten up all of my upgrade items before the not-final-boss fight, leaving me disadvantaged if the real boss turns out to be even more of a difficulty spike.

But hey, at least I was right about there being a Lumina twist. And it turns out that almost everyone in the world is an advanced robot created by the dick scientist, but that’s another of those twists so obvious that the characters’ surprise about it is legitimately strange. It’s not looking like my theory of a random evil robot pulling the strings is going to pan out, however, as the scientist dick just keeps going. I don’t know how many times he needs to be killed, but this post-credits stuff is absolutely incoherent in its attempts to staple plot holes shut with info dumps, so I guess he’s just immortal because blah blah moon magic. This is not a game for people who require satisfying answers to questions. This is a game for people who like to believe that friendship confers godlike powers capable of warping the fabric of reality.

Random rules

The main character also brings his mom back to life using memories. She went missing when he was little, but it turns out that he was a moon baby who was given to her, and he unconsciously sent her to a convenient parallel world of memories in order to protect her. Makes total sense! Then she starts to disappear and explains that you can only bring someone back from the dead using memories once, and it’s a temporary effect. I’m assuming that doesn’t apply to how the main character came back to life. Also, another character was restored from being turned into a zombie-like monster through the power of memories, but I’m guessing that also doesn’t count as being quite dead enough for him to disappear. Oh, and the mom has a daughter-like character who was apparently created from her memories, and this daughter character says something about disappearing similarly soon despite being created from the memories of a living person. If that’s how things work, then most of the world and the people in it will evaporate when the main character dies of old age regardless of whether the villain is defeated or not because the main guy was the one to restore everything. Starting to see how none of this makes a lick of sense? Lost Sphear’s logic is so twisted that merely playing it has given me a spinal injury.

Anyway, the memory daughter character stays behind to help everyone leave the weird memory world place, but Lumina says that they’ll come back and save her. I went back but couldn’t find her, so who knows if that’s a thing or not. On the one hand, character resurrections are a thing! On the other, there are no consistent rules, and it might turn out that resurrection magic only applies to people taller than 5’5, and only on Thursdays with clear weather. Or maybe the ending will friendship magic her and the main character’s mom back to life? When you make up the rules as you go, anything can happen! In an unfathomably bad, “crazy homeless man screaming a word salad story of his life at you on the subway” kind of way.

This is also a timed escape sequence, obviously. It’s funny how the writing is so bad that things that would ordinarily be noteworthy end up deprived of air.